William F. Buckley Jr. in "The March of Freedom"

About the Author

[The following chapter appeared in "
The March of Freedom: Modern Classics in Conservative Thought,"
a publication of The Heritage Foundation featuring essays from 15
writers, scholars, and statesmen whose thoughts and deeds gave
conservatism its contemporary form. An introductory commentary from
Heritage President Edwin J. Feulner Jr. is followed by an essay
from the late William F. Buckley Jr.]

By Edwin J. Feulner Jr. (1994)

Founder of National Review, host of Firing Line, writer of spy
novels, sailor in all weather, player of the harpsichord, lover of
the Latin Mass, and definitive authority on God and man at Yale,
William F. Buckley Jr. is quite simply the most famous conservative
of his generation. When he broke upon the intellectual scene in
1955, with the publication of God and Man at Yale, Ronald Reagan
was still a card-carrying Democrat, and conservatism as we know it
today was barely a glimmer in Russell Kirk's eye. In the four
decades that have followed, Bill Buckley has been the leader of
America's conservative insurrection--a revolution hatched in the
cramped offices of National Review and fed on Pat Buckley's chicken
salad sandwiches. The long march up from liberalism has led through
the wilderness of Goldwater's defeat, to the promised land of
Reagan's victory, and over the corpse of communism. At every stage
of the journey, Bill Buckley has confidently called the cadence.
And all the while, he has conducted a running seminar on the art of
writing and the art of living.

If, as George Orwell insisted, "political chaos is connected
with the decay of language," then the reordering of American
politics is inseparable from Bill Buckley's resurrection of
rhetoric. He is an orator in an age of mutterers. A rhetorical
pyro-technician for whom every day is the Fourth of July. A
polemicist with the power to convince or enrage but never to
disappoint. An elegant eulogist who expands our empathy into places
we never expected. An essayist with no patience for the shapeless,
the careless, the colorless. A verbal craftsman with an unfailing
ear for the rhythm of words. A philosopher who adds the fuel of
ideas to the fire of political debate.

It is difficult now to remember how isolated the conservative
remnant seemed in the 1940s and early 1950s, meeting by torchlight
in its catacombs. In August of 1945, Churchill was defeated and a
newly elected Labor majority in England walked into Parliament
singing the "Red Flag," a leftist battle hymn unsung since the
Spanish Civil War. At home, the Republican Party adopted a program
that was little more, in Buckley's words, than "measured
socialism." Historian Morton Smith stated that conservatism "is all
but dead in our present world."

It was not true, but it felt like it was true. Ronald Reagan
joked that he had received his first issue of National Review "in a
plain, brown wrapper." "The few spasmodic victories conservatives
are winning," Buckley wrote in 1954, "are aimless, uncoordinated
and inconclusive. This is so ... because many years have gone by
since the philosophy of freedom has been expounded systematically,
brilliantly and resourcefully."

But midway through the 1950s, the philosophy of freedom found
its voice--systematic, brilliant, resourceful--and it belonged to a
freshly minted graduate of Yale. In a swirl of passionate public
controversy (with Vidal, Mailer, Kempton, Galbraith, Baldwin), the
young Buckley introduced liberals to humility and inspired
conservatives to confidence. His arguments were illuminated by the
lightning of wit and suffused with scholarship. They made right
reason seem plausible, then inevitable. It soon became clear that
Buckley was not just developing a following, but a movement.

William F. Buckley Jr., with his drawled "Waal ..." and suits
that seem to come pre-rumpled from the cleaners, is one of the most
recognizable men in America. But to those who know him, he is most
easily recognized for acts of personal kindness and unexpected
generosity. It is unprecedented that a life of such intense
argument should yield so many friends. Friends in trouble who have
discovered bills mysteriously paid. Friends who have found the
private Buckley unfailingly tolerant of the failings of others.
When Bill was running for Mayor of New York City against John
Lindsay and Abraham Beame, New York Times columnist Murray Kempton
observed, "The only one in the group I would dare call collect long
distance for a loan is William F. Buckley."

The public style is playfully self-confident ("I don't stoop to
conquer. I merely conquer.") But his polemic always has a purpose;
his erudition always serves an ideal. He is impatient, for example,
with the tart skepticism of H.L. Mencken ("He debunked for the sake
of debunking," Buckley has observed). His own approach he describes
as knowing "about the quality of reverence and feeling it strongly
and feeling that the holy things should be treated venerably." In
this category he counts his Church, his nation, and his alma mater.
When he has been critical of these things, it is always evidence of
loyalty and love, never disdain.

He has demonstrated that wit is possible without cynicism; that
a pundit can also be a pilgrim. "I am not tortured by the problems
that torture a great many other people," he writes, "because I do
very sincerely and very simply believe in God and in the whole of
the Christian experience. And there are enough resources in it to
show me where to go." It is the key to understanding both his
character and his politics. "I myself believe that the duel between
Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world."

Liberalism's chief flaw, Buckley argues, is spiritual: its
skepticism and relativism; its elevation of method over substance;
its defense of freedom as an end in itself. It "has no eschatology;
no vision, no fulfillment, no point of arrival." Freedom, while the
highest goal of democracy, cannot be the highest goal of
civilization. It is a road on which we travel, not a house for us
to live in. Our true destination is defined by the creed we hold
about the cosmos in which we live. Liberalism's epistemological
relativism reduces everything, including politics, to unsignifying
sound and fury. "It cannot care deeply, and so cannot be cared
about deeply," he writes. "There is nothing there of ultimate
meaning to care for, though there is much there to despise." It is
a political faith crippled by moral apathy, unable to distinguish
between noble and base, just and unjust, or to "call for the kind
of passionate commitment that stirs the political blood."

William Buckley was born November 24, 1925, sixth of ten
children--nine of whom would go on to write or work for National
Review. His father was an oilman of imposing presence ("He
worshipped three earthly things: learning, beauty, and his
family"). His mother, a woman of gregarious, Southern grace ("She
was wonderfully content making others happy by her vivacity, her
delicate beauty, her habit of seeing the best in everyone"). Before
his teens, Bill's cosmopolitan upbringing had made stops in
Venezuela, France, and England. A precocious youth, he was fluent
in French and Spanish before entering prep school, and already
possessed of strong, early convictions. As a boy of six, he sent a
letter to the King of England demanding that His Majesty repay his
war debts to the United States. At age fifteen, he received a note
from his father admonishing him "to be more moderate in the
expression of your views and [to] try to express them in a way that
would give as little offense as possible." "That must have been,"
wrote one biographer, "the most wasted piece of advice since the
Prime Minister counseled Edward VIII against hanging out with
divorcees."

At Yale, Bill proved a natural debater and rose to the
chairmanship of the Yale Daily News. Invited to give the
university's annual Alumni Address, his speech urged Yale to
declare "active Christianity the first basis of enlightened thought
and action" and "communism, socialism, collectivism ... inimical to
the dignity of the individual." The Administration promptly
censored it. God and Man at Yale, written a year after graduation,
extended and developed this critique of anti-Christian and
collectivist bias in higher education. It was praised in the
Saturday Review as having "a clarity, a sobriety, and an
intellectual honesty that would be noteworthy if it came from a
college president." The book's criticisms clearly struck a nerve
(McGeorge Bundy pronounced its author "a twisted and ignorant young
man"). They also struck a chord. Buckley's bombshell became a
best-seller, launching his career.

At this point, the narrative of Bill Buckley's life becomes a
biography of the conservative movement. A few days short of his
thirtieth birthday, he founded National Review. Forrest Davis,
editor of The American Mercury, recalls his first meeting with
Buckley, who was traveling to Washington to recruit writers for his
new journal: "This positive kid came into the restaurant, with his
tie half off, sat down, kicked off his shoes, and became the focus
of the whole table's attention. By the time he left the restaurant,
he had its staff almost fighting for the chance to serve him. I
thought, 'Here's a man who's going somewhere.'" From the first
issue, the new magazine invited strong reactions. Author Dwight
Macdonald charged it with "brutality," "banality" and
"vulgarity"--the work of "half-educated provincials." Even the
faithful had some initial doubts. Russell Kirk wrote T.S. Eliot
that the magazine evinced "too much Yale undergraduate spirit." But
that spirit proved a weapon of enduring value, managing the
difficult task of being literate about the illiterate, witty about
the witless. It not only jousted with the Black Knight of
liberalism and collectivism, but revealed it, on closer inspection,
as a tattered, toothless scarecrow. After the Chernobyl meltdown:
"The Soviet Union has finally contrived to give power to the
people." On the CIA: "The attempted assassination of Sukarno last
week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room
was killed except Sukarno." On a suggested advertising campaign for
the New York Times classified section: A smiling picture of Castro
above the slogan, "I Got My Job Through the New York Times."

The magazine found an immediate influence because it managed to
bring together (and hold together) a group of brilliant,
contentious, sometimes difficult men--James Burnham, Russell Kirk,
Frank Meyer, Willi Schlamm. The glue that maintained this united
conservative front was Bill Buckley's personality. "Morale at NR,"
writes Garry Wills, "was kept up, in the early years, almost as an
army's is. And the source of the unifying spirit was evident.
Things lit or dimmed at NR with the coming or going of ... Bill's
laugh."

Beyond this task, the magazine acted as the Buckley Writing
Academy--cultivating talent like George Will, Garry Wills, Chilton
Williamson, and Richard Brookhiser. It became, through the quality
of its writing and the force of its personalities, the single place
to talk directly to the entire conservative movement. The place
Ronald Reagan chose to write, after the Goldwater defeat, that
conservatism was not routed, just its "false image." The place
Patrick Moynihan chose to announce the failure of his pet project,
guaranteed income programs ("And so you turn out to be right," he
congratulated Buckley).

In a life hectic with accomplishment, National Review is Bill
Buckley's proudest achievement. Once, when asked by supporters to
run for governor of New York, he replied, "I could not make the
time to run for governor, given my obligations to National Review.
My friends couldn't understand my priorities. But I was very
content with them." The attention he lavished was rewarded: Many
conservatives learned in its pages, for the first time, that they
were not alone. Listen to two witnesses:

Peggy Noonan: "I started reading NR, and it sang to me. They saw
it the way I was seeing it: America was essentially good, the war
is being fought for serious and valid reasons, the answer to every
social ill is not necessarily a social program, when you let a
government get too big you threaten your own liberties--and God is
real as a rock. I was moved, and more. It assuaged a kind of
loneliness. Later I found that half the people in the Reagan
administration had as their first conservative friend that little
magazine."

Pat Buchanan: "It is difficult to exaggerate the debt
conservatives of my generation owe National Review and Bill
Buckley. Before I read NR, there was virtually nothing I read that
supported or reinforced what I was coming to believe. We young
conservatives were truly wandering around in a political
wilderness, wondering if there was anyone of intelligence and wit,
any men of words, who thought and felt and believed as we did....
For us, what National Review did was take the word conservatism,
then a synonym for stuffy orthodoxy, Republican stand-pat-ism and
economic self-interest, and convert it into the snapping pennant of
a fighting faith."

In 1965, Bill Buckley raised that pennant in a run for Mayor of
New York City, his only excursion into electoral politics. Though
he refused to display what he called "the usual neurotic confidence
of all political candidates," the race was not a lark. motives were
didactic, not political." A showing of 13.4 percent for a
conservative in Gotham was more than respectable, but Bill's head
was never turned by politics. "As one gets older, one has to decide
whether to be a critic or a statesman.... When Ronald Reagan
offered me the ambassadorship to Afghanistan, I said, 'Yes, but
only if you give me fifteen divisions of bodyguards.' I was offered
the United Nations and I said no. It is an illusion that you need
to be a formal member of government to have real power." He
believes, with good reason, that his voice is better amplified by
writing than running. In 1970 he was asked, "What would you feel
about running for a seat in the House?" "God, no," he replied. "Not
unless I can have all the seats simultaneously"

Recounting Bill Buckley's accomplishments becomes difficult,
because his cruising speed is several gears higher than most. His
life reveals not a minute that the locust has eaten. In 1960, he
helped organize Young Americans for Freedom. In 1961, he was
instrumental in founding the New York Conservative Party; Firing
Line was started in 1966, quickly earning an Emmy. Given the
breadth of his interests, it is not surprising that he has
published books on everything from Joe McCarthy to celestial
navigation, from national service to children's literature. His
passion for sailing has carried him in the wake of Columbus across
the Atlantic and then across the Pacific for good measure. At age
fifty, he began a series of ten best-selling spy novels. The week
he went into semi-retirement from National Review, he performed a
harpsichord concerto with the North Carolina Symphony. "I get
bored," he says, "winding my watch." But we who are privileged to
watch him are never bored.

Two great contributions define Bill Buckley's place in the
history of conservative thought. The first is his built-in,
shockproof, ideological balance detector. Conservatism is
notoriously difficult to define and any of its elements--freedom,
order, tradition--can be taken to extremes that undermine the
whole. There is a line beyond which an emphasis becomes a mania;
and beyond which a political movement is disqualified from the task
of governing. It has been Bill's role to grab the wheel and give it
a sharp turn when conservative thought veered toward "crackpot
alley."

Never was this role more important than when the movement was
still a kicking fetus. Conservatism in the 1950s was colorful,
eccentric--and largely irrelevant. Some taught that theism was
weakness and altruism a crime. Others accused Dwight Eisenhower of
being a communist agent. In both cases, Bill Buckley shored up the
ideological levies that defined the course of the conservative
mainstream. The result was a movement prepared for Goldwater and
respectability, and then for Reagan and power.

Buckley's second contribution has been to lend conservatism an
intellectual style that challenges its designation by J.S. Mill as
"the stupid party." ("As the intelligent are liberals," Maurice
Baring once commented, "I am on the side of the idiots.") For the
liberal establishment, Buckley's besetting sin was not his
conservatism, but his intelligence and wit--the fact that he is
both conservative and interesting. This was a threat like none it
had ever seen--the prospect of defeat on its own turf and terms.
During his run for Mayor of New York, Buckley was informed that "a
senior editor of the New York Times confessed ... that he had taken
to dispatching different reporters to Buckley's press conferences
because 'everyone who came back after a couple of them said he was
going to vote for [him].'" Even the liberal palace guard could no
longer be trusted.

The select company of those represented in these essays is
familiar company for Bill Buckley. Albert J. Nock was a friend of
Bill's family during his youth, often lunching at their home in
Connecticut. Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham were
fellow-laborers in the vineyards of National Review. Michael Novak
was a religion editor at the magazine. Whittaker Chambers and Bill
developed a close, spiritual friendship which lasted until
Chambers' death in 1961 (recorded in the moving volume Odyssey of a
Friend). Bill Buckley, it seems, has always been the epicenter of
rumbles on the right.

"The Conservative Framework and Modern Realities" is taken from
Up From Liberalism, published in 1959. It is a meditation on the
meaning of conservatism--a creed so easy to live for and so
difficult to define. Buckley, elsewhere, admits the challenge: "I
have never failed to dissatisfy an audience that asks the meaning
of conservatism." Usually his mischievous response is to quote
Richard Weaver: "A paradigm of essences toward which the
phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation." Here
his answer is more clearly developed. Conservatism, he argues, is
not an ideology, but it does have discernable principles at its
core. Such principles must respect political reality, yet there are
limits to maneuver--issues, times, and places where conservatism
can bend but must not break. The result is a balancing act, "a
dance along a precipice." But the currency in which our success is
counted is always human freedom, not as an end but a means--the
power to "live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God,
subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority
of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth."

Buckley commends a conservatism that is principled, but not
dogmatic; that balances long-term goals with the politics of the
present. The objective is not the consistency of simple minds--the
clean, well-lit, padded room of a single idea. It is to skillfully
adjust to current circumstances until all our fundamental
commitments--freedom, order, community, justice--are aligned in the
same conservative vision. This allows for vigorous disagreement on
the right over policy without recourse to anathema and schism
because our unity is found in broad themes, not specific measures.
"It is not a single conservative's responsibility or right to draft
a concrete program--merely to suggest the principles that should
frame it." But those principles remain the best hope of every
future we canimagine.

I first met William Buckley in the fall of 1964 at the
organizing committee meeting for the Philadelphia Society, also
attended by Don Lipsett, Frank Meyer, and Milton Friedman.
According to the early records of the group, Bill Buckley loaned
the Society its first one hundred for organizing expenses at that
meeting. (Since I was an impecunious graduate student at the
Wharton School, it was highly unlikely that I would be in the
position to have start-up funds for such a risky venture.) Thirty
years later, the Philadelphia Society continues to fill a vital
role as a meeting place for American conservatives. Bill has a
talent for encouraging the small beginnings of great things. He is
a gardener who has seen redwoods grow to maturity.

His association with The Heritage Foundation is a long one. He
was a featured speaker in 1980 at the dedication of the Noble and
Coors Buildings, our first Heritage headquarters. He also spoke
when we dedicated the Fertig Board Room in our current building.
But off the public platform, the private Buckley has been a friend
of mine and of Heritage. Bill's talent for hospitality and his
unfailing good humor have steadied and unified the conservative
movement. At his semi-annual dinners and discussions, all the
disparate factions of conservatism are invited and reminded of the
battle against a common enemy that is more important than the
squabbles among natural allies.

Over the years, Bill Buckley has baffled opponents with his
insistent, infectious cheerfulness--the attitude of a man
continually surprised by joy. This has strengthened the
conservative cause, but its source is deeper than the ideology it
enriches. Even Bill Buckley's spirited conservatism reveals an
underlying and unsettling realism. "It is undoubtedly necessary,"
Buckley writes, "every now and then, to bare one's teeth; and we do
so, preferably, in the course of smiling. But the smiles have a way
of freezing, as sadness rolls in. The joys of warmaking [for
conservative causes] presuppose the eventual stillness of victory:
and that, so far as I can see, is beyond our reach. Perhaps it was
meant to be so." But there is more to say--infinitely more. When
asked by one interviewer whether "most dogmas, theological as well
as ideological, do not crumble sooner or later," he replied, "Most,
but not all." How, the interviewer persisted, could he be so sure?
Because, Buckley affirmed, "I know that my Redeemer liveth."

With G.K. Chesterton, William F. Buckley asserts that "the men
signed of the Cross of Christ go gaily in the dark." And the
darkness itself is lifted as men and women follow his example.

---

The Conservative Framework and Modern Realities

By William F. Buckley Jr.

"... an essay such as this is far more important for what it
destroys--or to speak more accurately for the destruction which it
crystallizes, since the ultimate enemy of myth is
circumstance--than for what it creates. This is sharply at odds
with the conventional wisdom. The latter sets great store by what
it calls constructive criticism. And it reserves its scorn for what
it is likely to term a purely destructive or negative position. In
this, as so often, it manifests a sound instinct for
self-preservation." -- J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society

Up where from liberalism? There is no conservative political
manifesto which, as we make our faltering way, we can consult,
confident that it will point a sure finger in the direction of the
good society. Indeed, sometimes the conservative needle appears to
be jumping about as on a disoriented compass. My professional life
is lived in an office battered by every pressure of contemporary
conservatism. Some of the importunities upon a decent American
conservatism are outrageous, or appear so to me, at any rate. ("We
should have high tariffs because the farmers have high subsidies,
and they shouldn't, by the way.") Some are pathological ("Alaska is
being prepared as a mammoth concentration camp for
pro-McCarthyites.") Some are deeply mystical ("The state can do no
good." My answer: It can arrest Communists, can't it?); some
ambitiously spiritual ("Conservatism has no extrinsic significance
except in relation to religion.") Some urge the schematization of
conservatism ("What passes for conservatism these days is nothing
more than sentimentality and nostalgia. Let us give it structure
..."); or the opposite ("Beware the ideologization of
conservatism.")

Still, for all the confusion and contradiction, I venture to say
it is possible to talk about "the conservative position" and mean
something by it. At the political level, conservatives are bound
together for the most part by negative response to liberalism; but
altogether too much is made of that fact. Negative action is not
necessarily of negative value. Political freedom's principal value
is negative in character. The people are politically stirred
principally by the necessity for negative affirmations. Cincinnatus
was a farmer before he took up his sword, and went back to farming
after wielding some highly negative strokes upon the pates of those
who sought to make positive changes in his way of life.

The weakness of American conservatives does not reduce neatly to
the fact that some want tariffs, others not. Dr. Robert Oppenheimer
was much taken during the 1950s by what goes by the name of
"complementarity," a notion having to do with revised relationships
in the far reaches of philosophical thought, where "opposites" come
under a single compass, and fuse into workable philosophical and
physical unities. No doubt Physicist Oppenheimer was sticking an
irreverent finger in the higher chemistry of metaphysics: but his
theory, like the Hegelian synthesis, served to remind us that there
is almost always conceivable the vantage point from which the
seemingly incongruous, the apparently contradictory, can be viewed
in harmony. A navigator for whom two lighthouses can mark extreme
points of danger relative to his present position, knows that by
going back and making a wholly different approach, the two
lighthouses will fuse together to form a single object to the
vision, confirming the safety of his position. They are then said
to be "in range."

There is a point from which opposition to the social security
laws and a devout belief in social stability are in range; as also
a determined resistance to the spread of world Communism--and a
belief in political noninterventionism; a disgust with the results
of modern education--and sympathy for the individual educational
requirements of the individual child; a sympathetic understanding
of the spiritual essence of human existence--and a desire to
delimit religious influence in political affairs; a patriotic
concern for the nation and its culture--and a genuine respect for
the integrity and differences of other peoples' culture; a militant
concern for the Negro--and a belief in decentralized political
power even though, on account of it, the Negro is sometimes
victimized; a respect for the omnicompetence of the free
marketplace--and the knowledge of the necessity for occupational
interposition. There is a position from which these views are "in
range"; and that is the position, generally speaking, where
conservatives now find themselves on the political chart. Our most
serious challenge is to restore principles--the right principles;
the principles liberalism has abused, forsaken, and replaced with
"principles" that have merely a methodological content--our
challenge is to restore principles to public affairs.

I mentioned in the opening pages of this book that what was once
a healthy American pragmatism has deteriorated into a wayward
relativism. It is one thing to make the allowances to reality that
reality imposes, to take advantage of the current when the current
moves in your direction, while riding at anchor at ebb tide. But it
is something else to run before political or historical impulses
merely because fractious winds begin to blow, and to dismiss
resistance as foolish, or perverse idealism. And it is supremely
wrong, intellectually and morally, to abandon the norms by which it
becomes possible, viewing a trend, to pass judgment upon it;
without which judgment we cannot know whether to yield, or to
fight.

Are we to fight the machine? Can conservatism assimilate it?
Whittaker Chambers once wrote me that "the rockcore of the
Conservative Position can be held realistically only if
Conservatism will accommodate itself to the needs and hopes of the
masses--needs and hopes which like the masses themselves, are the
product of machines."

It is true that the masses have asserted themselves, all over
the world; have revolted, Ortega said, perceiving the revolutionary
quality of the cultural convulsion. The question: how can
conservatism accommodate revolution? Can the revolutionary essence
be extravasated and be made to diffuse harmlessly in the network of
capillaries that rushes forward to accommodate its explosive force?
Will the revolt of the masses moderate when the lower class is
risen, when science has extirpated misery, and the machine has
abolished poverty? Not if the machines themselves are
irreconcilable, as Mr. Chambers seemed to suggest when he wrote
that "... of course, our fight is with machines," adding: "A
conservatism that cannot face the facts of the machine and mass
production, and its consequences in government and politics, is
foredoomed to futility and petulance. A conservatism that allows
for them has an eleventh-hour chance of rallying what is sound in
the West."

What forms must this accommodation take? The welfare state! is
the non-Communist answer one mostly hears. It is necessary, we are
told, to comprehend the interdependence of life in an industrial
society, and the social consequences of any action by a single part
of it, on other parts. Let the steel workers go on strike, and
sparkplug salesmen will in due course be out of work. There must be
laws to mitigate the helplessness of the individual link in the
industrial chain that the machine has built.

What can conservatism do? Must it come to terms with these
realities? "To live is to maneuver [Mr. Chambers continued]. The
choices of maneuver are now visibly narrow. In the matter of social
security, for example, the masses of Americans, like the Russian
peasants in 1918, are signing the peace with their feet. I worked
the hay load last night against the coming rain--by headlights,
long after dark. I know the farmer's case for the machine and for
the factory. And I know, like the cut of haybale cords in my hands,
that a conservatism that cannot find room in its folds for these
actualities is a conservatism that is not a political force, or
even a twitch: it has become a literary whimsy."

Indeed. The machine must be accepted, and conservatives must not
live by programs that were written as though the machine did not
exist or could be made to go away; that is the proper kind of
realism. The big question is whether the essential planks of
conservatism were anachronized by the machine; the big answer is
that they were not. "Those who remain in the world, if they will
not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms [said
Mr. Chambers]. That is what conservatives must decide: how much to
give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to
give up the basic principles. And, of course, that results in a
dance along a precipice. Many will drop over, and, always, the
cliff-dancers will hear the screaming curses of those who fall, or
be numbed by the sullen silence of those, nobler souls perhaps, who
will not join in the dance." We cliff-dancers, resolved not to
withdraw into a petulant solitude, or let ourselves fall over the
cliff into liberalism, must do what maneuvering we can, and come up
with a conservative program that speaks to our time.

It is the chronic failure of liberalism that it obliges
circumstance--because it has an inadequate discriminatory apparatus
which might cause it to take any other course. There are unemployed
in Harlan County? Rush them aid. New Yorkers do not want to pay the
cost of subways? Get someone else to pay it. Farmers do not want to
leave the land? Let them till it, buy and destroy the produce.
Labor unions demand the closed shop? It is theirs. Inflation goes
forward in all industrial societies? We will have continued
inflation. Communism is in control behind the Iron Curtain? Coexist
with it. The tidal wave of industrialism will sweep in the welfare
state? Pull down the sea walls.

Conservatism must insist that while the will of man is limited
in what it can do, it can do enough to make over the face of the
world, and that the question that must always be before us is, what
shape should the world take, given modern realities? How can
technology hope to invalidate conservatism? Freedom, individuality,
the sense of community, the sanctity of the family, the supremacy
of the conscience, the spiritual view of life--can these verities
be transmuted by the advent of tractors and adding machines? These
have had a smashing social effect upon us, to be sure. They have
created a vortex into which we are being drawn as though
irresistibly; but that, surely, is because the principles by which
we might have made anchor have not been used, not because of their
insufficiency or proven inadaptability. "Technology has succeeded
in extracting just about the last bit of taste from a loaf of
bread," columnist Murray Kempton once told me spiritedly. "And when
we get peacetime use of atomic energy, we'll succeed in getting all
the taste out!"

How can one put the problem more plainly? I assume by now Mrs.
Kempton has gone to the archives, dusted off an ancient volume, and
learned how to bake homemade bread. And Lo! the bread turns out to
be as easy to make as before, tastes as good as before, and the
machine age did not need to be roasted at an auto-da-fé to
make it all possible. A conservative solution to that problem. But
when the atom does to politics what it threatens to bread, what
then is the solution? Can one make homemade freedom, under the eyes
of an omnipotent state that has no notion of or tolerance for, the
flavor of freedom?

Freedom and order and community and justice in an age of
technology: that is the contemporary challenge of political
conservatism. How to do it, how to live with mechanical harvesters
and without socialized agriculture. The direction we must travel
requires a broadmindedness that, in the modulated age, strikes us
as antiquarian and callous. As I write there is mass suffering in
Harlan County, Kentucky, where coal mining has become unprofitable,
and a whole community is desolate. The liberal solution is:
immediate and sustained federal subsidies. The conservative,
breasting the emotional surf, will begin by saying that it was many
years ago foreseeable that coal mining in Harlan County was
becoming unprofitable, that the humane course would have been to
face up to that realism by permitting the marketplace, through the
exertion of economic pressures of mounting intensity, to require
resettlement that was not done for the coal miners (they were
shielded from reality by a combination of state and union aid)--any
more than it is now being done for marginal farmers; so that we are
face-to-face with an acute emergency for which there is admittedly
no thinkable alternative to immediate relief--if necessary (though
it is not) by the federal government; otherwise, by the surrounding
communities, or the state of Kentucky. But having made arrangements
for relief, what then? Will the grandsons of the Harlan coal miners
be mining coal, to be sold to the government at a pegged price, all
this to spare today's coal miners the ordeal of looking for other
occupations?

The Hoover Commission on government reorganization unearthed
several years ago a little rope factory in Boston, Massachusetts,
which had been established by the federal government during the
Civil War to manufacture the textile specialties the Southern
blockade had caused to be temporarily scarce. There it was, ninety
years after Appomattox, grinding out the same specialties, which
are bought by the government, and then sold at considerable loss.
"Liquidate the plant," the Hoover Commission was getting ready to
recommend. Whereupon a most influential Massachusetts Senator, Mr.
John F. Kennedy, interceded. "You cannot," he informed a member of
the Commission, "do so heinous a thing. The plant employs 136
persons, whose only skill is in making this specialty." "Very well
then," said the spokesman for the Commission, anxious to cooperate.
"Suppose we recommend to the Government that the factory retain in
employment every single present employee until he quits, retires,
or dies--but on the understanding that none of them is to be
replaced. That way we can at least look forward to the eventual
liquidation of the plant. Otherwise, there will be 136 people
making useless specialties generations hence; an unreasonable
legacy of the Civil War."

The Senator was unappeased. What a commotion the proposal would
cause in the textile-specialty enclave in Boston! The solution, he
warned the Commission, was intolerable, and he would resist it with
all his prodigious political might.

The relationship of forces being what it is, the factory
continues to operate at full force.

To be sure, a great nation can indulge its little extravagances,
as I have repeatedly stressed; but a long enough series of little
extravagances, as I have also said, can add up to a stagnating if
not a crippling economic overhead. What is disturbing about the
Civil War factory incident is first the sheer stupidity of the
thing, second the easy victory of liberal sentimentalism over
reason. Subsidies are the form that modern circuses tend to take,
and, as ever, the people are unaware that it is they who pay for
the circuses.

But closing down the useless factories--a general war on
featherbedding--is the correct thing to do, if it is correct to
cherish the flavor of freedom and economic sanity. There is a
sophisticated argument that has to do with the conceivable economic
beneficences of pyramid building, and of hiring men to throw rocks
out into the sea. But even these proposals, when advanced
rhetorically by Lord Keynes, were meliorative and temporary in
concept: the idea was to put the men to work until the regenerative
juices of the economy had done their work. Now we wake to the fact
that along the line we abandoned our agreement to abide, as a
general rule, by the determinations of the marketplace. We once
believed that useless textile workers and useless coal miners--and
useless farmers and useless carriage-makers and pony
expressmen--should search out other means of employment.

It is the dawning realization that under the economics of
illusion, pyramid building is becoming a major economic enterprise
in America, that has set advanced liberals to finding more
persuasive ways to dispose of the time of the textile specialty
workers. And their solution--vide Galbraith--is great social
enterprises, roads, schools, slum clearance, national parks. The
thesis of the Affluent Society is that simple. We have (1) an
earned surplus, (2) unemployment, (3) "social imbalance" (i.e., too
many cars, not enough roads; too much carbon monoxide, not enough
air purification; too many children, not enough classrooms.) So let
the government (1) take over the extra money, (2) use it to hire
the unemployed, and (3) set them to restoring the social balance,
i.e., to building parks, schools, roads.

The program prescribed by Mr. Galbraith is unacceptable,
conservatives would agree. Deal highhandedly as he would have us do
with the mechanisms of the marketplace, and the mechanisms will
bind. Preempt the surplus of the people, and surpluses will
dwindle. Direct politically the economic activity of a nation, and
the economy will lose its capacity for that infinite responsiveness
to individual tastes that gives concrete expression to the
individual will in material matters. Centralize the political
function, and you will lose touch with reality, for the reality is
an intimate and individual relationship between individuals and
those among whom they live; and the abstractions of widescreen
social draftsmen will not substitute for it. Stifle the economic
sovereignty of the individual by spending his dollars for him, and
you stifle his freedom. Socialize the individual's surplus and you
socialize his spirit and creativeness; you cannot paint the Mona
Lisa by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.

Conservatives do not deny that technology poses enormous
problems; they insist only that the answers of liberalism create
worse problems than those they set out to solve. Conservatives
cannot be blind, or give the appearance of being blind, to the
dismaying spectacle of unemployment, or any other kind of
suffering. But conservatives can insist that the statist solution
to the problem is inadmissible. It is not the single conservative's
responsibility or right to draft a concrete program--merely to
suggest the principles that should frame it.

What then is the indicated course of action? It is to maintain
and wherever possible enhance the freedom of the individual to
acquire property and dispose of that property in ways that he
decides on. To deal with unemployment by eliminating monopoly
unionism, featherbedding, and inflexibilities in the labor market,
and be prepared, where residual unemployment persists, to cope with
it locally, placing the political and humanitarian responsibility
on the lowest feasible political unit. Boston can surely find a way
to employ gainfully its 136 textile specialists--and its way would
be very different, predictably, from Kentucky's with the coal
miners; and let them be different. Let the two localities
experiment with different solutions, and let the natural desire of
the individual for more goods, and better education, and more
leisure, find satisfaction in individual encounters with the
marketplace, in the growth of private schools, in the myriad
economic and charitable activities which, because they took root in
the individual imagination and impulse, take organic form, And then
let us see whether we are better off than we would be living by
decisions made between nine and five in Washington office rooms,
where the oligarchs of the Affluent Society sit, allocating
complaints and solutions to communities represented by pins on the
map.

Is that a program? Call it a No-Program, if you will, but adopt
it for your very own. I will not cede more power to the state. I
will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not
to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a
miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then
use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man,
but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors;
never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at
the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not?

It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and
liberals at bay. And the nation free.